History: Private lives and public reputations

Private lives and public reputations Heroes, statesmen and ordinary citizens catch the eye of Andrew Holgate

IN COMMAND OF HISTORY: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World Warby David ReynoldsAllen Lane £30Churchill’s influence on our views about the second world war is almost as profound as his influence on the conflict itself — his six-volume history of the war created a narrative template that has been copied by historians ever since. Reynolds’s fascinating piece of literary-historical detective work looks in detail at the writing of this flawed magnum opus, which Churchill undertook with the help of a small army of aides, and with one eye firmly trained on history, his own reputation and the realities of cold-war politics. Secrets such as Enigma were kept, disasters such as Dieppe glossed over, important post-war politicians such as Eisenhower soft-soaped, and epic turning-points in the East almost ignored (Churchill set aside just four pages for Stalingrad). How much of the finished work, which netted him at least